President Joe Biden will leave office having added more to the national debt in total dollars than any other president in U.S. history, despite having only served one term.
"Not only has the Biden admin racked up $8.4 trillion in debt, but they've also run down Treasury's cash balance by $1.0 trillion - that's a net overspending of $9.4 trillion, or more than 1/4 of the entire federal debt," Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni posted Monday on social media platform X.
The annual federal deficit has not been under $1 trillion since Biden became president, peaking at $2.77 trillion in fiscal year 2021 (which included the last three-plus months of Donald Trump's term), then hitting a low of $1.38 trillion in FY 2022, $1.7 trillion in FY 2023, and $1.83 in FY 2024.
Why such an explosion of deficit spending under Biden? Was it a spending problem or a revenue problem? Clearly, the former.
Why in the world was more money spent last year than during the height of the pandemic, when the federal government was paying a vast swath of the workforce to stay home?
Because Biden and the Democratic-led Congress went on a spending spree. Revenues hit a record high of $4.9 trillion in FY 2024, so if Democrats had just returned to the pre-COVID spending ballpark, the country could have hit a balanced budget, or perhaps even a little surplus.
But they could not help themselves.
First came the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021, which sparked the worst inflation in 40 years, because the economy was already well on the way to recovery.
Next, Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law in November 2021.
Then, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 as a scaled-down version of Biden's Build Back Better proposal.
The "green" initiatives included in the Inflation Reduction Act are costing almost three times more than the administration forecasted, Bloomberg reported.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, working with the investment firm Goldman Sachs, updated their estimated cost of the act's green initiatives from $385 billion over a 10-year period to in excess of $1 trillion in April 2023.
And all the new deficit spending led to higher inflation, prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. That led to the cost of servicing the national debt exceeding over $1.2 trillion in FY 2024, more than the entire Defense Department budget and second only to Social Security.
The most enduring Biden legacy will be fiscal irresponsibility.
Hopefully, Trump and the Republican Congress will be able to right the ship before it's too late and the country sails off a fiscal cliff.
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